The Hunting Party

Aims to make a point and sharpen it3starsGo to showtimes

Published 5:30 am, Friday, September 21, 2007

Journalism isn't the most photogenic profession in the world, and not because journalists aren't the most photogenic professionals in the world.

That is not an insurmountable hurdle at the movies, not when a young Robert Redford or an old Richard Gere is in the wings, wavy hair at the ready, waiting to make us look good.

It's the process of journalism that isn't always pretty: reporting, note-taking, swearing at the keyboard whenever the "A" sticks. Television journalists have a leg up on print reporters, being a handsomer subspecies with larger gizmos, but even they have to sit down and write at some point. And who wants to watch that for two hours?

Memorable films about journalists and journalism therefore have little to do with the harshest realities of the field — namely, deadlines — and everything to do with the harshest realities of storytelling. Such is the case with The Hunting Party, a snarky and engaging hero's saga about a washed-up freelance TV reporter (Gere) in Bosnia Herzegovina who sniffs out the wooded hiding place of a Serbian war criminal nicknamed The Fox (Ljubomir Kerekes) and risks everything in hot pursuit of an exclusive.

Written and directed by Richard Shepard (The Matador, another study in engaging snark), opens with a tantalizing promise: "Only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true." It then pushes ahead with a seriocomic plot that doesn't blaze new trails, exactly — it follows one bumpy mountain road to its climax — but it does make room for the latest, loose-screw character part in the reinvention of Gere's career.

We first meet his Simon Hunt in a long opening flashback narrated by Terrence (append gushing qualifier) Howard as Duck, the longtime cameraman who rode shotgun in their years covering war zones for a major network. Those halcyon days came to an end when Simon filmed a stand-up sloshing drunk and tossed objectivity to the wind, railing against the Serbs. We hear why later, although the explanation seems less like epiphany than a carelessly handled plot point.

Geopolitics play a sizeable role here, sometimes as tragedian, sometimes farceur. The United Nations does not come off well, though Mark Ivanir (as a bumbling but decent Bulgarian peacekeeper) does. Shepard channels much of his energy and his anger into a single, cruel irony: That years after the war ended, some of its deadliest perpetrators haven't been brought to justice. In a country the size of Kentucky, they haven't even been found.

The Hunting Party doesn't aim to make sense of this fact; it aims to make a point and sharpen it, bristling with sarcasm. An old yellow Benz trundles ahead, past Olympic ski jumps and glowering locals as Simon, Ducky and a green network scion (Jesse Eisenberg) trade quips and escalating life-or-death anxieties. At various points en route they're mistaken for CIA and threatened with death by assorted oddball sleazeballs, and I found myself — unaccountably — spotting parallels with the old Peter Falk version of The In-Laws. "Whatever you do, don't stare at the midget!" might have been Falk's line, but it's Gere's, and it's a fine piece of dialogue indeed.

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Dylan Baker, as a shirt-stuffed CIA honcho, looks out of place in this eccentric universe. So does the movie's quietly shocking conclusion, which reminded me uncomfortably of The Brave One's — and made me wonder where this bunch learned their trade. "Don't believe everything you hear in journalism school," Simon says, but by then it's clear they aren't journalists. They're members of a hunting party, and it's the chase that counts.